First Song

Casey was restless tonight, and I was finding it hard to sleep from worrying about here. Muse had already told me that everything was fine, but seeing her twisting and turning was wrenching my heart. She didn’t look peaceful.

Instead of sleeping, my mind was turning over what had happened earlier today. The image of Ryan on the floor kept playing over and over in my head, but I was struggling to feel sorry for him. As a boy he had been the worst of the worst, and adulthood didn’t look like it had changed much.

I knew that it was wrong for me to feel this way, but I couldn’t help it.

‘How you feel is valid, Erin,’ Muse said to me. ‘Never feel like your emotions are wrong.’

That made me smile – at least a little. 

If I’d learned anything from these last couple of weeks, though, it was that our space magic was way too powerful for us to use it against other humans. At least, without a serious justification. Sending bullies and cops to the hospital is not what it was for.

Casey seemed to have learned that, too. She had been ready to run away from me to protect me – though thankfully she’d decided to stay.

I pulled my knees up to rest a cheek against them. Casey really looked like she was going through a rough time.

‘Hunter told me that she had accepted their proposal, and they are now in the process of forming an eternal bond with each other,’ Muse informed me.

“Did I toss and turn in my sleep when you did that to me?” I asked, my voice barely a whisper.

‘You were crying for the duration,’ she answered, her voice soothing. ‘It made me feel awful, if it’s any consolation.’

The window was still open, and the cold night air made me shiver again. I slipped back under the quilt and tried to snuggle up to Casey as best I could. It was tough going with her moving around so much.

My body hadn’t been feeling as tired today as it had over the course of the last two and a half weeks, which I took to be a sign that things were starting to reach their conclusion. I’d been really excited for the changes at the beginning but now I was looking forward to seeing what life would be like afterwards.

It was well after midnight when I managed to fall asleep, despite the constant movement of the woman murmuring next to me.

---

- Wednesday -

Casey was nuzzling my neck when I woke up on Wednesday morning. I broke into a lazy smile, rolling over to face her. She was smiling adoringly at me with heavy-lidded eyes.

“Good morning,” she whispered to me in her exotic accent, leaning in to plant a kiss on my nose.

“Good morning,” I giggled, swiping a lock of hair out of my eyes and tucking it behind my ear. “How did you sleep?”

She grumbled at me, her eyes closing, “I’m not sure, but I feel like I didn’t sleep at all.”

I lifted my arm out from under the covers and used a finger to gently caress her cheek. “Then you should get some rest,” I suggested.

There was another small grumble, but she was already nodding off. I ran my fingers through her chaotic mess of near-black hair until she was away.

I snuggled up to her, allowing myself some more precious minutes of slumber.

 

Casey was still asleep when a certain furry pest woke me up. The needle-like sensation of sharp claws was agony on my exposed arm.

“Ow, Sabina, ow,” I complained, shooing her away. She bounced up my torso, staring into my eyes for a moment or two. When I reached out to try to pet her, she evaded my fingers and resumed her hopping around my bedroom.

Ugh. Bloody squirrels.

Resigned to my fate, I searched my memory for our plan for today.

It took a few seconds for it to come back to me. Casey and I were going to find a spot to try training, plus we were going to pick up my letter from the doctor.

Oh! This was also the morning when I would finally get to wear my very own clothes! Of the feminine kind, I mean. 

I had become so caught up in the drama of yesterday that I didn’t even remember that we’d bought them until it was time for bed.

For the first day in my life, I was able to get dressed in my own underwear and bra. Casey was still fast asleep – so I kept the volume of my euphoria to a minimum – but I would have to give her plenty of thanks once she woke up.

“Woo!” I whispered loudly, pumping the air.

I searched through the bags and found a new pair of jeans, plus one of the plain t-shirts in wine-red. Removing the tags wasn’t a problem, despite a certain squirrel trying to get her claws on my new clothes.

In the mirror I looked absolutely, unmistakably feminine. I posed, putting my hands on my hips and twisting from side to side. The woman in the reflection smiled happily to herself, then went downstairs to begin the task of fetching breakfast.

‘You look so happy, Erin,’ Muse told me, while I hummed a tuneless series of notes. I was making scrambled eggs on toast – something that any self-respecting student was capable of doing.

It was just as I was dishing up the egg that I saw a pair of dark silhouettes step up to the front door. The contour of the shadows immediately set off alarm bells in my head – it was the police.

And then the doorbell rang.

What, that was it? I’d expected at least one team of armed response with full breaching apparatus – especially for a girl that had sent five men with machine guns to the hospital. But no, it looked like it was just two of our regular neighbourhood bobbies.

Intrigued, I put the half-empty saucepan of scrambled egg back down on the cooker and wandered to open the door. Muse had better be ready, just in case.

I flicked my hair over one shoulder as the two police officers came into view, a man and a woman. Their gaze had been sweeping over the exterior of the property.

“Hi?” I asked hesitantly, and they turned towards me.

Both of them were wearing the dark – almost black – uniforms that most Police wore, with stab-vests and gender-specific headwear. The female officer had the bowler hat – rounded with the small brim, while the male constable had the more flat style cap.

They both broke out into pleasant smiles when they saw me, and I couldn’t resist giving them one of my own in reply.

“Good morning, ma’am,” the male officer greeted me. “Would we be able to come in?”

I nodded without even thinking and stepped aside for them to enter. They dipped their heads and removed their hats as they came in.

Just as I was closing the door behind them, I noticed another vehicle outside – different from the police car that these two had obviously arrived in. This other one was a nondescript, grey saloon with blackened windows. I squinted at it, the hairs on the back of my neck immediately starting to rise.

As I led them into the living room, I heard the slight creaking of the floorboards upstairs. Casey must have woken up.

“Is someone else here?” the woman asked me – she must have heard the noise too.

I nodded back to her, “My girlfriend is upstairs.”

The two looked at each other briefly, then turned to give me forced smiles. Well, that didn’t feel awkward at all. I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d just told them I was a lesbian or if it was because they wanted to speak to Casey. Maybe both?

I stood in the doorway, on the threshold between the living room and the hallway while I waited for the two officers to be seated. My attention was still fully aimed towards the staircase.

Casey came wandering down a few moments later, dressed very casually in a pair of jeans and red chequered shirt. My heart fluttered when I saw her and I couldn’t help but break into a smile.

“Hey, babe,” she called out to me once she reached the bottom of the stairs.

“Hey,” I replied, my voice going quiet. There was a moment when I considered warning her about our guests, but assumed that they’d hear me and think something was up. Instead, I reached for her hand. Maybe Muse could tell her instead.

As soon as skin met skin her eyes opened wide, and she gave me a worried look.

“Here?” she mouthed, gesturing towards the living room.

I nodded twice.

“I’ve left some breakfast in the kitchen for us,” I told her at a more natural volume. “Could you bring it in? There are some people here that want to speak to us.”

She gave me an uncertain nod, and then a smile, stepping closer. We shared an unhurried kiss, just out of view of curious eyes.

“Thank you for the clothes, hun,” I whispered to her after those long seconds, making her blush.

 

The two officers introduced themselves to us as we sat side-by-side, eating our breakfast. The man’s name was Cooper while the woman’s name was Black –  we were only given their last names.

“We’re here because of an incident that occurred at approximately three thirty yesterday afternoon,” the man began.

“The one just outside the school, with Ryan McNamara?” I asked. That question earned me a small, tight smile from them both. 

Dread was starting to spread up from my stomach. Were they here to arrest Casey? Had he died overnight?

Worst case scenarios were popping into my brain.

“We understand that he’s not looking to press charges at this time,” the female officer said, now, and I let out a breath I hadn’t realised I’d been holding. “All we’re trying to do is get a statement from you as to what happened.”

Her eyes were on Casey.

In Casey’s defence, she was American. It was possible she didn’t even register that these were Police in the sense that she was used to. They weren’t even carrying guns. It really shouldn’t have surprised me when she burst out into a laugh.

“I’m sorry,” she drawled afterwards, smiling widely. “This is just like I’m in a TV show or something.”

That earned a small chuckle from both of them.

She happily answered all of their questions after that, even while still eating the rest of her scrambled egg breakfast. She told them about the threats that Ryan had been making against Sarah and her girlfriend, and about how we’d only been there to ask him to leave her alone. 

I chipped in to include the fact that he’d tried to hit her first.

After about fifteen minutes, and a politely declined offer for cups of tea, they left. They thanked us for our time as they were on their way out, and left us with a number to call if we remembered anything else.

I saw no sign of the nondescript vehicle from before as I stood watching the police car drive away. It must have moved on since I’d first spotted it, although I still had a lingering feeling in my gut that we were being watched.

---

After breakfast and a little personal time, Casey and I decided to go for our walk to find a secluded place where we wouldn’t be discovered. We needed to be able to experiment with our abilities without someone walking in on us. There wasn’t anywhere immediately near our house now that the woods had been cleared to make space for even more homes. That meant we ended up having to go for quite a lengthy stroll.

“You Brits really hate wilderness, don’t you,” Casey complained to me after we’d trekked for almost an hour. We’d been circling around my hometown, but everywhere had been too public, “I think I can see the next city over already.”

She wasn’t wrong – except in that she’d called it a city. The entire country felt like you could never really escape other people. Not unless you went somewhere crazy like Cornwall.

We eventually decided that we’d need to leave the roads behind and very cross-country if we were to find anything. There was a small hill nearby that allowed us to get a better impression of the lay of the land. The view was stunning once we reached the top. Casey was impressed with the view, at least.

There was a patchwork of farmers’ fields as far as the eye could see, but they enclosed some extensive, dense woodland not too far away. It looked like it could work for us – at least in the short term.

We wandered our way around the edges of the fields, picking our way towards the trees.

Casey eyed me playfully as we drew closer, a mischievous smile playing across her lips. “Race you!” she called, already breaking into a run for the treeline.

I squealed and chased after her, still getting used to the feeling of my body in full flight.

She slowed as she entered the wood proper to allow me to catch up with her, and we ambled in while holding hands. It didn’t look like too many people came here. The ground was covered in leaves, branches and patches of bracken. There weren’t any obvious paths or clearings, either.

Casey singled out a relatively clear spot between three trees, then turned to look at me, a confident smile curving her lips.

“Alright then,” she began to say, then stopped – puzzled. “Can Muse hear your thoughts, too?”

I nodded, “Yeah. She’s always been able to.”

“Weird. Hunter was never really able to do that before. It’s a bit freaky,” she said to me, shivering slightly.

“You get used to it,” I smiled back.

We released our hands and separated so we were several metres apart. When I turned back to look at her, she didn’t seem to be at all as confident as she had been just a few moments before. This change in her self-assuredness was new – I hadn’t seen her looking so worried and vulnerable before. Maybe Hunter had said something?

She was still my warrior princess, though.

‘She will be finding this different from what she is used to,’ Muse informed me. ‘I warned Hunter about what happened to you the first time, and they're explaining it to her. You’ll both be breaking new ground together.’

Right. The whole issue of losing emotional control – it’s bad. It’s a good thing someone had thought to warn her.

 

Half an hour in and Casey was already getting the hang of things. She also seemed to be regaining her poise. After some experimentation, she found that electricity was the easiest thing for her to channel. I guess that made sense – it was the form everything had taken for me so far.

Even while Casey was figuring it all out like she’d done this all before, I was struggling. It was difficult to get back into the headspace I’d had that time when I’d accidentally levitated my phone. 

The memory of how it had felt was still in my mind, but nothing was happening when I tried to replicate it. Even the meditative techniques that Muse was suggesting weren’t giving me that sense of inner connection that I remembered having.

Frustration got the better of me eventually, and I dropped to the ground, rubbing at my temples with my fingers. I closed my eyes, settling into a cross-legged position.

‘Remember, it is more about emotion than concentration,’ Muse reassured me. ‘You are more than capable of this, you just need to feel it.’

Sorting through my feelings was always a minefield these days, but I tried to remember exactly what I’d been doing. I had been imagining myself in a field of flowers, hadn’t I? Oh yeah, that’s where I’d been wearing Sarah’s summer dress.

I took a deep breath, trying to get back into the flow I’d felt that day. From what I could recall, it had been a time of happy calmness. I’d just allowed myself to be me, and all of the drama of the world had been someone else’s problem.

A breeze wafted over my skin, making me shiver. I did my best to hold onto the first wisps of the sensation that I was experiencing.

‘Emotion, not concentration,’ Muse reminded me.

And then it was gone again. Goddess damn it.

I was just about to get up when something solid fell into my lap. The surprise of it shocked me into opening my eyes, just in time to see Casey looking at me in sympathy.

She’d thrown my phone at me, the earbuds still attached. 

I lifted an eyebrow at her, questioning. She mimed putting something into her ears, then pointed at me.

Oh right. Listen to music! I’d been listening to music back then, too, hadn’t I?

I broke into a beaming smile at her, mouthing ‘thank you’ as I picked up my phone. She rolled her eyes, gave me a cocky half-smile, and went back to what she was doing with Hunter.

 

I scrolled through my playlist, finding something that I thought might help. Maybe getting into something intense would be a bad idea until I had more experience with all of this.

It took me about a minute to find something appropriate, pop my earbuds in and stand up. As the music began in earnest, I allowed it wash over me and through my very self of sense.

The currents in the air returned, and I could feel them brushing against a part of me I hadn’t felt before.

‘They are brushing against me, Erin,’ Muse said, with a small giggle. In that moment, feeling the energy as it moved between the two of us, it all made way too much sense.

Casey had stopped what she was doing to watch. It took a couple of seconds to realise that she was staring at my eyes.

I drew in a deep breath and extended my hand – palm upwards. All of the energy I’d been building up was released in a wave towards my fingers. Electricity crackled between my fingertips – and it tickled.

‘Now focus it,’ Muse instructed. I could tell that she was getting excited, and to be honest, so was I.

The arcs of lightning dimmed as I allowed myself to get distracted.

‘Let it go, Erin.’ 

Let it go?

Oh Goddess, was I a Disney princess now?

Muse hit me with a hysterical laugh.

The sound of her voice gave me the nudge back to focus that I needed.

Finding myself entering the last rendition of the chorus, I shifted the intention I’d had in my mind away from simply manifesting the energy, to projecting it. In response, the lightning at my fingertips changed form. All of the arcing ribbons moved, attracted to a single point a few centimetres above my palm. The instant that the laces of electricity had compressed to the size of a marble, it all collapsed into an incandescent sphere of brilliant white light. I had to shield my eyes – the luminance was blinding.

“Holy shit,” Casey almost shouted. She had to turn away too, covering her eyes with her arm.

I ripped the earbuds out with the other hand, allowing the feeling of connection to break. The energy currents that I’d been feeling faded into the background, while the electrical ball sputtered and evaporated into nothing.

“Whoa,” I managed to breathe, looking at my right hand.

“That’s fucking insane!” Casey called out to me, then gave me an emphatic thumbs up.

We spent a little longer working on our control. She still seemed to get it much more naturally than I did, especially when I didn’t have the music to help me focus. But, we were both already far better than we had been earlier in the day.

‘One day,’ Muse told me. ‘We shall have to try the First Song.’

She refused to say any more, but it sounded epic as all hell.

 

We were just about to head for home when my phone chimed, announcing the arrival of a new message. It was from Rishaan.

Wow, it felt like it had been forever since we’d spoken. A wave of guilt threatened to wash me into an ocean of shame thinking about how I’d been so obsessed with Casey that I’d neglected my friends. I couldn’t even remember when I’d last spoken to Claire.

Rish: Hey, check it out

Rish: There’s another one

Rish: Sounds like even more are out there too

He linked me to a new video that he’d seen circulating online. He told me that it was going viral.

As soon as I opened it, I saw that this one was different from any of the previous ones. There was an African-looking man facing towards the camera. His eyes were the same gold as mine and Casey’s, and his expression was calm and serious. By my estimates he seemed to be in his forties, maybe late thirties.

“Casey, you need to see this,” I called to her, gesturing for her to come to my side.

She brushed off some dirt from her shirt as she picked it up from the ground. She’d had a tank-top on underneath. It had both scared and excited me that she was stripping in the woods when I saw her unbuttoning half-way through the session.

Alas.

She wandered over, her eyes on the phone that I held.

“What is it?” she asked, unable to resist giving me a peck on the cheek.

“My friend Rish just sent me something,” I replied, and started playback of the recording. Both of us were watching the screen with intense interest, cheeks almost touching.

The man on the screen was quiet for a couple of seconds, and then began to speak.

“My name is Ademola Sowande,” the man said, in what sounded like some kind of African accent. “Friends, it is time for us all to come together.”

His English was good. I was still confused as to what this was about, but I couldn't fault his command of the language.

“You should know that my dearest friend and I – together – have been discussing what comes next. It is our belief that unity is our strength,” he continued, still gazing at the camera. “Some of you have already been noticed, but he is not upset. The others should make themselves known to us, as well.”

He spread his hands for the camera, “We shall be in contact soon.”

The man’s golden eyes flared just briefly, and he smiled at the camera. I felt reassurance and warmth in that smile.

The video ended.

“What the hell was that?” Casey asked, voicing my own thoughts.

‘We’ve been summoned,’ Muse told me, ‘Huh.’